Talk:Unnamed IKS Varchas personnel
There is a perfectly adequate Varchas personnel listing on the page for the ship, why can't this page be kept for those which we do not know the names of? --8of5 16:43, July 25, 2010 (UTC) :I've found that some other pages combine basic personnel listings with unnamed personnel, quite efficiently and making more of a one-stop information source for all personnel, named or not. I was going to include the named personnel in the moved list. :It seemed odd to have an unnamed personnel list without having a parent article of the personnel itself, so I was trying a different configuration of combining the two. -- Captain MKB 16:56, July 25, 2010 (UTC) ::For example, Kring's battle cruiser personnel combines a short named personnel list with some unnamed character profiles. I'm a little unclear on what difference would qualify the difference in the two article structures. -- Captain MKB 17:08, July 25, 2010 (UTC) Well in this case the parent article is the ship page. If this page is the personnel listing for the Varchas then that listing should be removed from the Varchas page. But the Varchas does not have a large crew, nor is it a particularly huge page, so I think it would be better to keep the crew listing on that page, rather than split up a small amount of information into two articles. The unnamed personnel component was appropriate split off as a specific subject, without removing information (and thus make things more complex) from the Varchas page. This set up demands all the crew should be taken from the Varchas page, which I don't think is very helpful or justified by the size of the Varchas’s crew. --8of5 17:18, July 25, 2010 (UTC) :Well, I'm just not sure of the reason for the inconsistency between the two styles -- the creator of one article chose to combine the named personnel and unnamed personnel in one list and the creator of the other article created a separate list for the unnamed personnel and merged the ship and the named personnel page. How is the difference determined? :For example, when I created the USS Surak personnel article I chose the style used by the person who created the Kring article, while you obviously disagree with that person and prefer your Varchas style. -- Captain MKB 17:24, July 25, 2010 (UTC) Correct, there are two opposing styles. I believe we should only ever split off personnel lists when the ship in question has an overwhelmingly large list of crew that would occupy a disproportionate amount of the ship page. Which with very limited exception is only really the main series ship. The Varchas or Kring's ship do not have huge overwhelming crew lists, the Surak s is a little bigger, but could probably still manage just fine on the ship page. There are two reasons I prefer this: #The crew listing is an important part of a ship, so I think it takes something away from a given ship article to remove that information when we don't really need to. #It adds an extra step (maybe leading to irritation) to a user trying to find a crew person of that ship: ::*Ship page> crew person user was looking for ::*Ship page> personnel page> crew person user was looking for It doesn't make any difference for unnamed personnel, but adds an extra step, that we needn't add, for named ones. --8of5 17:37, July 25, 2010 (UTC) :I'm not clear on what difference you're trying to explain. Why is the Varchas list going to be handled differently from the Kring list and the Surak list? Why aren't we going to be consistent? -- Captain MKB 17:42, July 25, 2010 (UTC) What? I'm not suggesting we treat them differently. Read it again. I'm saying we should keep crew lists on the ship pages (making exceptions only for major ships with HUGE lists) and that only unnamed personnel should be linked off to a separate page specifically for listing unnamed personnel, keeping the links to named personnel on that ship's page. --8of5 17:45, July 25, 2010 (UTC) :OK, again, you've gone into a lot of detail and I had a bit of trouble digesting it all. :I'll make my position much simpler to explain. I disagree with your assertion that these crew lists should be folded back into the parent ship articles. They're separate topics, one is an article about the ship, another is a fully fleshed out list describing the named and unnamed crews. As my edit that you were responding to shows, I prefer a style where the named personnel are in a list with the unnamed personnel, thus creating a topic of enough length to stand as a separate topic. -- Captain MKB 17:59, July 25, 2010 (UTC) Where as I think the people serving aboard a ship are a key piece of information on any given ship and should be kept on that ship page as much as possible. Your argument seems to be suggesting we always split off crew listings to separate pages? Why create two pages when it works on one? Why make a user have to travel to a second page to find a link to any given member of the crew of a ship when they could just find it on the ship's page? Why add complexity?? --8of5 18:30, July 25, 2010 (UTC) :I'm not advocating adding extra lists for complexity's sake. I am saying that, once you have a body of information about unnnamed personnel, the list is already too big to remain on the ship page -- that is, the whole of the personnel data (with the named plus the unnamed) is too big to keep on the ship page. in these instances, the named and unnamed should not be split up because you are then introducing unnecessary complexity by creating two destinations for the data, back to the ship page for the named and an unnamed page for the rest, when the split could be avoided by one whole unified personnel page. :This would obviously only occur in cases where the ship crew data as a whole was too long to fold back into the ship page, and large crew lists could then have the further split when they grow too large between the named and the unnamed. -- Captain MKB 19:01, July 25, 2010 (UTC) Ok got you. Consider this: The unnamed listings are more than just a list, they are individual character pages for each of the unnamed people (though merged together to collective page of unnameds). That's how I understand them, and that's why I think unnamed personnel pages should be link on a list of crew, not just a block on the end of a list; because they are character pages more than lists. For minor ships and small crew listings, such as all those given as example on this page, I believe that lists of crew should be on the ship page, with the unnamed personnel page a link on that list. This also avoids the situation id described above which I think is an issue, the arrangement you propose adds another layer of effort to find a named character. Say I'm looking for that bird doctor guy on the Surak. I don’t know his name, so I go the Surak page. If we don’t merge the crew list and unnamed listings then I can find him straight away on that page, if we do, I have to go to another page first before I can find him. *USS Surak> avian doctor *USS Surak> USS Surak personnel page> avian doctor. This doesn’t make any difference to unnamed crew, they are listed on a separate page either way, but it does make a more complex arrangement for named personnel. --8of5 19:15, July 25, 2010 (UTC) :Conversely, if you know he was a person, and not a ship, you could just go directly to the personnel list to find him. I mean, using common sense, do you really go directly to a ship article when you are looking for a list of people, or do you go directly to a category or list? -- Captain MKB 19:37, July 25, 2010 (UTC) I'd go straight to the ship because I don't have to be familiar with our naming conventions to find that. You seem to be assuming a casual reader knows Memory Beta as inside out as you; why should they have to know a personnel page or category even exists when they could just find the information on the original ship page? Much more simple! --8of5 19:46, July 25, 2010 (UTC) :As the creator of Kring's battle cruiser personnel, it's obviously which I support. As for the separate pages being an inconvenience for casual readers: is it? If they've taken the time out to come to Memory Beta and searched for Kring's battle cruiser using the increasingly annoying search engine, is it really a hastle to click a single link. --The Doctor 20:50, July 25, 2010 (UTC) Sure it's not a big hassle, but why add any hassle at all? Kring's ship crew listing has two named people, why bother to send readers further to look for them when they could so easily be kept on the main ship article, which is hardly a page suffering from being too long! Also, Mike your argument that users should think to go straight to the personnel listing page doesn’t add up either if you're suggest we don't always make a personnel page for each ship... --8of5 20:58, July 25, 2010 (UTC) :Well in Kring's case, yes we do only have two named personnel, but we also have three unnamed officers, so that makes the case for its existence anyway. In other cases, I'll leave the defense to those more eloquent than myself. In my case, as ever, I take my lead from Memory Alpha. --The Doctor 21:02, July 25, 2010 (UTC) Well my argument is that unnamed pages should be just that; there's no need to fold in this personnel listing aspect as well. It means the unnamed pages are rightfully treated as character pages in themselves, not relegated to a subsection of a list. The unnamed characters get these pages to allow us to document them as distinct characters, that's a different function to just listing characters. --8of5 21:07, July 25, 2010 (UTC) :In this case I have to agree with 8. Unnamed personnel pages are almost like articles rather than lists, and I believe they should have their own pages and not be folded into a regular personnel article. --Long Live the United Earth 21:31, July 25, 2010 (UTC)